Miura, Ayumi
Masachiyo Amano, Michiko Ogura, and Masayuki Ohkado, eds. Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts: The Global COE Programme, International Conference 2007 (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 187-200.
Identifies and tabulates "new" impersonal verbs used by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain-poet, describing factors that affected their usage, especially imitation of Old French forms.
Studies the distribution of Chaucer's impersonal verb "listen" (to be pleasing), focusing on disparities between distributions in prose and verse, usage in formulaic expressions, and transition from impersonal to personal usage.
Miura, Ayumi.
Yoshiyuki Nakao and Yoko Iyeiri, eds. Chaucer's Language: Cognitive Perspectives (Suita: Osaka, 2013), pp. 99-124.
Examines Chaucer's uses of the word namely and argues that, while it is widely assumed that the word functioned only as a particularizer in Chaucer's time, some cases do not exclude the possibility of another function as appositive marker.
Describes Chaucer's arrangements of multiple adjectives (preposed, postposed, and combined), contrasting his practice with other Middle English writers, and exploring the poetic value of his usage, suggesting that he seems to have been "the writer…
Miyajima, Sumiko.
Research Activities (Faculty of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Denki University) 21: 39-51, 1999.
Assesses Griselda of ClT in light of the folkloric tradition of the "Chichevache," said to have eaten ideal wives in medieval Europe. Includes visual representations of the legendary beast and describes the relations of ClT to its sources.
Miyoshi, Yoko.
Hisashi Shigeo, et al., eds. The Wife of Bath (Tokyo: Gaku Shobo, 1985), pp. 30-47.
From the viewpoint of a history of social economics, Miyoshi explains why the poet chooses Bath as the Wife's place and shows that it was not unusual to to marry five times.
Adam is a more complex work than generally thought, evoking Adam the "first father" and "the earthly instrument of chaos and capriciousness." The scribe's "long lokkes" link him to Chaucer's other prideful, foppish characters. The threatened…
Uses Chaucer (MilT and the absent Plowman), Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Bishop Reginald Pecock to investigate changing ideas regarding "post-plague labor practice" and the traditional concept of the plowman.
Modarelli, Michael.
English Studies 89 (2008): 403-14.
Modarelli examines the characterization of Pandarus in TC, particularly the way he acts "with the agency of an author"--one in a "trinity" of authors that includes the narrator and the poet. Using Tzvetan Todorov's formulation of "constructive…
Middle English "ragen" acquires meanings within a defined semantic field of sexual activity and then attracts to itself a limited set of further energetic sexual meanings. Among instances illustrating this usage are GP (1.257), MilT (1.3774), and…
Mogan, Joseph J., Jr.
Chaucer Review 4.2 (1969): 123-41.
Studies the "theology of marital relations" in MilT, WBP, and MerT, using ParsT as a partial statement of orthodoxy, surveying views from Augustine to Wyclif of the roles of procreation and pleasure in sexual relations between married partners, and…
Mogan, Joseph J., Jr.
American Notes and Queries 8 (1969): 19.
Observes that carpenter John's sense of worldly instability in MilT is established in 1.3423-30 and 1.3449-50, anticipating his ready acceptance of Nicholas's prediction of the Flood later in the Tale.
Describes considerations of mutability from "Antiquity Through the Middle Ages" and then focuses on Chaucer's works, with individual sections that assess aspects of the theme in Chaucer's translations, his lyric poems, his dream visions, TC, KnT, and…
Mogan, Joseph J., Jr.
Papers on Language and Literature 1 (1965): 72-77.
Identifies two examples of the "memento mori" motif and two of "ubi sunt" in TC, three of these added by Chaucer to his material, and all of them contributing to the poem's dominant theme of the transitory nature of human love and life.
Mogan, Joseph John, Jr.
Dissertation Abstracts International 22.10 (1962): 3669-70.
Traces the development of the notion of mutability from decay to progress, with related motifs, and assesses its place in Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" and the "De Contemptu Mundi" of Innocent III. Then examines Chaucer's "peculiar…
Moi, Toril.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 11-33.
Reviews controversy (important in TC studies) on courtly love in Robertson, Donaldson, and Benton; naive "reflectionism" is attacked by Marxist theorists. In "De amore," desire is a hermeneutical challenge: "God for Andreas, like death for Lacan,…
Moisan, Thomas (E.)
Chaucerian Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1983), pp. 131-49.
Both in "Romeo and Juliet" and in PardT "the rhetoric through which death appears to be sought...is the means by which its reality and meaning are evaded."
Friar Lawrence of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet echoes Pandarus of TC. As rhetors, both are fond of apothegms; dramatically, each acts as a go-between; thematically, each reflects how truth escapes human efforts to capture it in fiction.
Rhetorically and thematically, the association of Theseus with solempnytee in KnT strains against the chaotic forces at work in the world of the Tale. Shakespeare opens the gap between Theseus's solemnity and comedy in A Midsummer Night's Dream for…
